by Rebecca West
We gave him a good luncheon, considering it was wartime. Of course he had excellent food in the Army, but we were able to give him some of the dishes he had always liked from childhood, like onions done in pastry like apple-dumplings, with kidneys inside them, and roly-poly with mincemeat instead of jam. Onions were scarce as they always are in wartime, but Uncle Len kept us supplied with them, and Kate’s mincemeat was doled out a little at a time and was keeping well. After luncheon Mamma said that she would rest, and Richard Quin went out to see his old head-master and the man and his wife who had shown him their racing pigeons, they had become great friends of his. He was back for tea, and afterwards he brought down some of his musical instruments, and we meant to play, but three of his friends who had been at school with him and could not go to the war came round to see him. One had been rejected on medical grounds, the two others were engineers. They looked at Richard Quin with wonder and dismay, and one said, ‘This is all wrong for you, old man, I can’t think of you except as amusing yourself.’ We left them and went to sit in the dining-room. On many other evenings we had heard the laughter and voices of our brother and his friends in another room, and we could pretend that this evening was as those. Soon Mamma retreated into the blank and upright slumber which had taken her to itself the night before; but she awoke at the right time to remind us that we should start him off on his way to dinner with Alan and Cordelia and the Houghton-Bennetts. We did not wait up for him, that would have been letting the occasion appear too plainly as what it was. But of course we heard him come in.
‘Shall we go down and make tea for him?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Mary. ‘So often he has been up later than us and gone down to the empty kitchen and got something out of the larder, he will want to do it again.’
Later the lock of the french window below our room clicked, and we heard his tread on the iron steps and the gravel path. Without turning on the light we got out of our beds and crept to the window and knelt to look under the raised sash. We saw the red circle of his cigarette passing slowly from his lips to his hand, from his hand to his lips, the moth-glow of his uniform, as he stood under the trees at the end of the lawn.
‘Not everybody gets killed in a war,’ whispered Mary.
‘No, not even in this war,’ I answered.
We went back to our beds and, as on the night before, fell at once into a dreamless sleep, that ended suddenly, and brought us back into the real night of day as wide awake as if we had had no respite from it. The hours passed then as they had passed the day before, pleasantly and with an infinity of pain. We made music in the morning. Miss Beevor came in at noon, wearing her best terracotta velvet, and bringing a bottle of Madeira, almost the last of her Papa’s little cellar, so that we could all drink Richard Quin’s health together. We sat in a solemn circle in the sitting-room, and all got a little drunk on a single glass. Kate had been called in to take part in the ceremony, and she said suddenly, ‘I will leave the washing-up till late in the afternoon. There’s been too many breakages.’ And Miss Beevor got quite drunk. Suddenly she looked round at us and said with an air of surprise, ‘What a distinguished family. Richard Quin, I know everything will go right for you. How soon can you become a Major?’
He said with an air of concern, ‘Not until I have had six horses shot under me.’
She said, shuddering, ‘Oh, how cruel. But is that so even when you are not in the cavalry?’
We all laughed at her, and she complained we were dreadful to her, and laughed too, and said she must go home now, and she would walk on air, she felt so happy about us, we were all so wonderful. Mary and I took her out, and in the hall we ran into Mr Morpurgo, who had been asked to luncheon. She bent her great height over his pear-shaped plumpness and asked playfully, ‘Do you know what?’ His large viscid eyes, under which there was now a pouch of equal size, rolled up at her. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ she told him triumphantly. He looked up at her with naked hatred, but she bounded on. In the doorway, however, she burst into tears. While she stood fumbling in the white kid bag from Athens, he came up behind her with the handkerchief which had been projecting in perfect folds from his breast-pocket.
‘I’ll have it washed and send it back,’ she sobbed.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Keep it, keep it.’
But as she got to the gate he called, ‘No, send it back, it’ll be no use to you because of the monogram. But I’ll send you a dozen with your monogram.’ As he turned back, he murmured to himself, ‘Better send two dozen. What is one dozen?’
He presented himself in the sitting-room in the character of an aggrieved man, and Mamma and Richard Quin hastened to comfort him. But his woes were not for us to remedy. His first complaint was the South African War had been his war and nobody thought anything of that nowadays, his second that two of the four men whom he employed to find him orchids in the forests of Asia and South America had been seized by the Allies and interned, one in India, one in the West Indies, because they were Germans. When we expressed interest and astonishment on hearing for the first time that he maintained this delightful embassade, he asked us, in the tones of the ant reproaching the grasshopper, how we thought that greenhouses were kept filled. Suddenly he opened the counting-house door and admitted us to knowledge of the details of his colossal expenditure, which became the more whimsical the further it travelled from the realm of necessity, for the more fantastic the results it sought the more certain it was that they could be achieved only by fantastic characters. What was worrying him about the orchid-hunter now interned at Calcutta was that the authorities might find out that the grim and taciturn botanist in their hands was a polygamist of immense range and persistence, who had wives all over the world, every one of them married to him by the most binding form known to her people. As Mr Morpurgo peevishly returned to the subject again and again, expressing forebodings they might stumble on evidence of the wife in Washington or the wife in Copenhagen or the wife in Malabar, and not understand that this thirst for impossible legitimacy ought to be overlooked in such a great botanist and courageous explorer, all of us lost ourselves in laughter. One of his ancestors must have been the professional storyteller of the bazaar in some town of domes and minarets, and he was turning back through the ages for his help.
But there came a time in the afternoon when there was nothing more to say. We had noticed with some surprise that Mr Morpurgo was wearing a wrist-watch, which was then not usual for a man of his age. He plucked it from his arm and gave it to Richard, saying that one of the things he would find as he went through life was that there was nothing more difficult than to find a reliable timepiece; and he abruptly left us. The watch was exquisite, profligate in its union of precious metal and craftsmanship, and Richard Quin was doubtful whether he ought to take it to France, though he loved it as he loved one of his musical instruments, his face was tender as he bent over it. But Mamma told him to take it, that of course it would get ruined, but that would give Mr Morpurgo pleasure too, he could get another one made, and he had so few pleasures. Richard Quin was glad when it was put like that, and went down to show it to Kate, and Mamma turned to us and said, wild-eyed, ‘If only Rosamund would come. She will be late. Can anything have happened to her?’ But then Richard Quin called to her to come and see something that Kate had given him and Mary said, ‘Rose, will you think me dreadful if I toss you to see who is to go to Victoria with Richard Quin and Rosamund, and who is to stay with Mamma? I can’t just say to you, “You can go.” I am sorry I can’t.’
‘Of course,’ I said, and took out a sixpence, and we knelt on the carpet and tossed it three times. I was tails and I always won.
‘That is all right,’ said Mary, rising to her feet. ‘Now I shall feel it was all in order that I couldn’t go.’
I remained on the floor, looking up at her in amazement. Never before had I realised how often Mary had said, ‘You can go,’ when only one of us could go to the ballet or to a concert or a drive. It is the meas
ure of the distance at which everybody, even those who were most friendly, kept us, that constantly we received invitations that ran, ‘Can Rose or Mary come with me to this or that?’ We had no intimates who would feel it always natural to ask one of us, because they were closer to that one. But of these alternate invitations, again and again she had stepped back and given me the chance to enjoy a pleasure that was often great. I told her so, I thanked her, but she cried out vehemently, ‘No, no, it is not good of me at all. Usually these invitations mean being with other people, which is always a risk, so I do not want to go. This time it means being with Richard Quin to the last, so I minded. But all the other times, you saved me from something.’
She spoke with such passion that I stared at her as if staring would show me her deep hidden trouble. I said, ‘But that isn’t all, you like me to have the fun of going. So.…’ I paused, wanting to say, ‘I would like to know the other reason why you step aside.’ But she broke out, ‘Of course I do, and it is a fair exchange, you are so good to me. There is nothing, nothing in you of Cordelia.’
‘Well, I should hope not,’ I said. ‘But, oh, Mary, how happy we could all have been if it had not been for the war.’
‘Not only happy,’ said Mary, ‘Richard Quin would have been more than happy.’
‘Much, much more,’ I sighed.
I on my knees, she standing above me, we looked into one another’s eyes and shook our heads.
‘But not everybody gets killed in a war,’ she murmured.
‘See what Kate has given me,’ said Richard Quin, who came back into the room with one arm out of his tunic. His short sleeve was rolled up, and just below his elbow he was wearing a bracelet, made of a few small blue beads, strung at wide intervals on a braid of two or three twisted horsehairs. The beads were vivid but dull, they might have been cut from turquoise matrix. ‘I do not like taking it from her. She told me that I must never take it off, day or night. That means she has never taken it off day or night, herself. She wore it above her elbow, it’s just right for me here. It is too good of her to give it to me. I had to take it. It may be awkward wearing it, it looks strange. But she wanted me to have it.’
‘It is a strange thing to think of her wearing it all the time and none of us knowing,’ said Mary.
Mamma said, ‘It looks Egyptian.’
We all stared at it, seeing at the same time the bright dark circle of a bucket filled to the brim with water, standing on a kitchen floor. Mamma and Mary and I were all saying to ourselves, ‘She would not have given him her amulet if she and her mother had seen anything dreadful happening in the water. For then there would have been no sense in giving him a thing to keep him safe.’ Kate was so very sensible. She would have given him something else instead, like sweets or handkerchiefs, that would have been useful to him for a short time.
Mamma said, ‘I think this bracelet is very old. They find poor people wearing them in hospitals, you know. They are handed down through the generations. They don’t talk about them.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
‘Rosamund was talking about it last time she was here. But I had heard of it before.’
‘It is a great honour to have it,’ said Richard Quin gravely, and rolled down his sleeve and put on his tunic. ‘Now I want to go to my room and look over my things. Shout up to me when Rosamund comes.’
But she did not come. We had expected her before tea, but at half past four she had not arrived. Mary and I went down to the kitchen and found Kate sitting with her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. We put our arms round her and kissed her and played with the pins in her cap, and Mary said, ‘Oh, dear, I wish it was all as it used to be, and that we could hear the muffin man’s bell ringing, and you could give us sixpences to go and buy some crumpets, as you used to when we were little and things had gone wrong.’
‘I wonder who buys the muffins,’ said Kate. ‘I’ve always found that, gentle or simple, crumpets are no use to them, now there’s no butter in the world.’
‘Come now, there’s some butter left,’ I said.
‘Some butter is no butter,’ said Kate. ‘Like eggs. If you have money you should be able to buy all the eggs and butter you want, or it’s just as bad as if there were none. I wonder what has happened to that muffin man.’
‘Yes, what can he be doing now that there is a war?’ I asked.
‘Richard Quin would have gone out and found him wherever he was,’ said Mary.
‘So would your Papa,’ said Kate. ‘God rest his poor soul.’
So she too knew that he was dead. We had never been sure of that.
Mary rubbed her face against Kate’s shoulder. ‘I wish Papa was here now,’ she said indistinctly. She rarely said anything so obvious.
‘People are where they ought to be,’ said Kate, ‘where they are sent. Some of my people are at the bottom of the sea, others are on it, and there it is.’
We were silent. Each, as we found out later, restraining herself from asking Kate if she were anxious about her kinsfolk who were at sea, so that we could guess from her answer if she and her mother had been looking in the bucket of water, and guess from that guess if she had looked for Richard Quin’s future too. But we knew that we should not traffic with magic, least of all now.
‘Miss Rosamund is very late,’ said Kate. ‘Shall I not serve tea? I think I will, as soon as the scones in the oven are ready.’
‘What, are there more scones in the oven?’ I asked. For on the table, between the chocolate and cherry cakes we had made out of our saved rations, a pile of scones was cooling on a wire tray.
‘Those are not good enough,’ said Kate. ‘Look at them, no lighter than you could buy in a shop, when I wanted to do them so well. But go and tell Richard Quin that tea will be ready as soon as he comes down.’
I found our brother standing in his room with a racket in each hand. ‘Has Rosamund come? No? I will come down in a minute but look, Rose, this is interesting. This is a brute of a racket, it always let me down. This is an angel. It plays the game for you. If I got tired, it never did. But I still don’t know what the difference between them is. They’re shaped the same, they weigh the same. A mystery, a mystery.’
He came downstairs happily, but after tea we were all distressed, for still Rosamund had not arrived. At last he sighed and said bravely, ‘Rose, put on your hat and coat, we must start without her.’ Then he kissed Mary, who said, ‘Oh, Richard, if only we could go to the war with you,’ and he said, ‘Yes, my dear, we would hold you up above the trenches and use you as a decoy.’ Then he kissed Kate, who said, ‘There will be no sense in cooking while you are away,’ and he kissed Mamma. She said nothing, but Richard answered her, ‘No’, he said, ‘you do not understand this. Think, if it were you and not me who were going to the front, how you would love it. But I should be appalled in that case. Realise what that means. Honestly, I am looking forward to going to France. You know how I love playing games. Well, I find gunnery quite a game. Mamma, Mamma, you must not be sad about me, because I have to do this and I am ready to do it. I am sure that if you had been told when you were a child about all the things that you were going to have to do, you would have thought you had better die at once, you would not have believed you could ever have the strength to do them. Well, it is like that now for me. You do understand that, don’t you? The only thing that would make me miserable would be if you didn’t.’
‘Yes, yes,’ murmured Mamma, ‘but do be careful, dear.’
We were all delighted by this injunction to a soldier going forth to fight in a World War, and in a chorus of laughter went out to the hall. As we opened the front door we heard the sound of someone running along the quiet street.
‘Dear Rosamund,’ said Richard Quin.
It might have been expected that she would be distressed by having had to miss so much of Richard’s last day at home and being so late, but when she met him at the gate and threw herself into his arms she was flushed and joyful. She held
her cap in her hand, the pins had dropped from her hair, which was nevertheless not in disorder, for it had fallen into the firm barley sugar curls that had hung on her shoulders when we first knew her. Her cape was swirled about her by a light evening wind, but she was as little discomposed as an actress who has a train to manage on the stage. Her gaiety was rich and complete and unembarrassed by the horrible occasion. It was nearly shocking. Yet it was what he needed. He hugged us both tightly by the arm, one on each side of him, and we ran along to the station, as if Lovegrove were our private garden and we could romp as we liked. Under his breath he sang the aria from The Marriage of Figaro which Figaro sings when Cherubino is going to war, and weaved talk through it. There was no difference between the youth of Cherubino and the youth of Richard Quin, and it was delightful to pretend that we were in an opera, that Richard Quin would go to the war again and again for hundreds of years and never get there.